Garden City Movement

The Garden City, the ideal of a planned residential community, as devised by the English town planner Ebenezer Howard and promoted by him in Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Social Reform (1898). Howard’s plan for garden cities was a response to the need for improvement in the quality of urban life, which had become marred by with issues like urban poverty, overcrowding, low wages, dirty alleys with no drainage, poorly ventilated houses, toxic substances, dust, carbon gasses, infectious disease and lack of interaction with nature. All this was due to the uncontrolled growth since the Industrial Revolution. The movement promoted satellite communities surrounding the central city and separated with greenbelts. These Garden Cities would contain proportionate areas of residences, industry, and agriculture. His idealised garden city would house 32,000 people on a site of 3,600 ha. Howard's diagrams presented such a city in a concentric pattern with open spaces, public parks, and six radial boulevards 37 m wide, extending from the centre, although he made it clear that the actual site planning should be left to experts. The garden city would be self-sufficient and when it reached full population, another would be developed nearby. Howard envisaged a cluster of several garden cities as satellites of a central city of 58,000 people, linked by road and rail. In his publication, Howard describes the Garden City as a utopian city in which people live harmoniously together with nature. The publication with self-explained illustrations resulted in the initiation of the Garden City Movement. The movement gradually became popular across the globe and became one of the most influential urban planning models. Several world popular urban planning concepts are based on Howard’s concept of independent small towns surrounded by greenbelts which offered all pros of a country and city. The movement in Britain led to the establishment of Letchworth and Hertfordshire in 1903, the only settlements formed exactly on Howard’s concept.